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World of Warcraft v1.11 Goes Live

Blizzard rolls out the Shadow of the Necropolis patch to an army of eager players.

The Internet came to a screeching halt today -- or at least it felt that way to a lot of people, thanks to the release of the latest major World of Warcraft patch Tuesday morning.

Subtitled "Shadow of the Necropolis," the v1.11 patch signals the arrival of Naxxramas, a new 40-man endgame instance floating above the Eastern Plaguelands. Split into several different wings, entering Naxxramas requires a one-time "attunement," which incurs various costs depending on your standing with the Argent Dawn faction.

In addition to the new dungeon, players will take part in a special event spanning several weeks, known as the Scourge Invasion. Throughout Azeroth, special crystal shards have appeared, acting as the spawning point for waves of undead. By beating the invaders back, players will complete new quests (mostly available at Light's Hope Chapel) and acquire new items and gear. Areas where invasions are taking place are easily viewable on the global map, and as servers came back online today, it wasn't long before hundreds of players descended upon each shard to destroy wave after wave of undead invaders.

Light's Hope Chapel is now a major hub, with an inn and plenty of quests.

Other major features of the patch include a new "keyring" feature which gives players a free bag to hold 4, 8 or 12 keys (depending on your character's level), freeing up some much-needed space for many players. Many items were given upgrades, such as the Zul'Gurub, Ahn'Qiraj and PvP rewards, and the mage and shaman talent trees were revamped, with all talent points being refunded, allowing those classes to retrain for free. On the technical end, a fix to the long-dreaded "A character with that name already exists" issue was finally added, allowing players to immediately log back in after a random disconnect.

One of the less popular changes in the patch so far has been the globalization of the "Looking for Group" chat channel, which (in theory) would let players coordinate party groups from anywhere in the world. On many servers, however, the channel has become flooded with spam, rendering it useless for the moment.

Minutes after servers became live, hundreds of players arrived to fight back the Scourge Invasion.

Not unexpectedly, the patch rollout wasn't without its hiccups. Many players reported issues with the in-game downloader stalling partway through, and servers didn't start coming back online until noon. While most were back in action by 1PM, a few had to be taken down again for more maintenance. The official WoW website and forums didn't fare much better, running slowly for most of the morning and afternoon, although the WoW website was finally updated with news of the upcoming Midsummer Fire Festival.